I went out to the front yard at dusk last night and clipped some of the mums. You can’t even tell any are missing, there are so many. I will keep replenishing these vases as long as I can.

Cheery flowers now in the kitchen:

And the office:

And so it begins…

I can’t take a screenshot of it all at once but trust me, it says 10 days of rain forecasts coming up. Oh boy…

But I’m getting sunshine in my life by three close friends moving to Portland in the next couple of weeks. One of them will be living with us. It’s been a long time since Peter and I had a roommate besides each other!

So, I’ll make this as short as I can. It’s not my style to slam a company or person, especially in a public forum. But I don’t know that there is anything else I could do, and I want to put this out there for any would-be Googlers as a warning.

Our situation with our temporary rental space is finally over (yes, we did move out over 2 months ago and were still dealing with it). If you are considering it, I would recommend against renting with the company When In Portland and owner(?) Michelle Rosa for your temporary Portland dwelling. In short: overpriced, misleadingly advertised, unclean, and worst of all slow/no communication to get stuff taken care of. Oh and we never met the landlord, ever.

Like I said I am torn to write this but when you are searching for a place to stay in a remote place sometimes all you have is Google. If any would-be renters have any questions, contact me.

This is a sign at the corner of NE Fremont & 57th Avenue. I don’t think they turn it on anymore and it seems someone started to paint over it and gave up at some point. I really enjoy old signs like this, pretty grand for just a mini-mart. I wonder what it was before.

Portland has a lot of Neon Signs and other grand old signs I want to take photos of.

Peter and I have always had a lot of books – mostly reference, because we aren’t really joy readers. And when I do get fiction to read, it’s usually from the library. We have never had a decent bookshelf so our books have lived in boxes and on random shelves. Finally for this house we bought some Ikea Expedit bookshelves for the conference room.

I was trying to decide how to arrange them. Since we don’t read by author it would be pointless to organize that way. We don’t even really know the formal titles of the books we reach for frequently, either – we just know what they look like. So, it seemed of no hindrance to go with an organization method I have seen done many times and always wanted to do – rainbow!

It took about 3 hours to do. We have a LOT of white and black spines, and though it is much less obvious, I ordered those in rainbow too – red letters on the spines first, for example.

We are very happy with the way it turned out; it’s like functional art for the conference room.

I really don’t want to think about taking all the books out when we get around to painting that room, though.